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Dungeons & Dragons offers a unique imaginative arena. Theoretically, it serves as a empty slate where the creativity of Dungeon Masters and players can paint countless scenarios. Yet, D&D also bears a five-decade history of campaign settings, creatures, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the most talented imaginative thinkers struggle to completely free themselves from this vast universe of existing content, so that a lot of “new” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reworking of familiar ideas. At times you get things that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you wince as if hearing “All Summer Long.”

Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the unique worlds of Exandria (designed by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While longtime fans of Brennan and his other series Dimension 20 work may identify some of his common themes (He really hates the deities!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a highly innovative take on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.

The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as evil outsiders) have been included in D&D since 1976, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A handful of distinct “angels” with individual titles appeared in Dragon magazine issues 12 (February 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than variations of the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to hold out for 1982 and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon, where he presented new monsters that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s where the deva, the planetar angel, and the solar first appeared, initiating a tradition of creatures known as celestial entities that is still present in the latest edition of the role-playing game.

In D&D, celestials are the servants of good-aligned deities, made by their creators to act as soldiers, commanders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and overall to populate their domains in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who fight against the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and help uphold the belief of their god on the mortal world. Despite their close connection with the gods, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Famous examples include Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is markedly underdeveloped compared to demonic entities. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and lords of demons tearing each other apart. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with greater violence and more interesting subplots. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gleaned in an short time of online research.

It’s not surprising that beings who resemble biblical angels received less attention. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax was uncomfortable about giving players game statistics for angels they could kill in their sessions, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of looks and roles, that problematic origin stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can do with beings that are created to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have free will, but their storytelling range is limited. In that sense, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic creatures that can evolve in a many ways without losing their distinct identity.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Redefines Celestials

To be frank, I get it: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of virtue that smite evil in all its forms can be impressive, but they also become clichéd very fast. That general lack of interest means we still don’t know that much about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what happens once the god who made them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is free to devise their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question central to the setting of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been killed by mortals in a great conflict that ended seven decades prior to the beginning of the campaign. So what happened to the servants of these divine beings?

Brennan’s answer is simple, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and became a blight that destroyed whole nations. A great deal about the history of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the current era has still to be revealed, but it appears that after the gods died, the celestial beings became “wild”. They became monsters that could destroy large areas if not contained. The audience caught a sight of how frightening such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “grandfather,” a terrifying celestial kept chained in a massive coffin.

It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestials in D&D, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with concluding the Blood War led to her being corrupted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was called forth by a priest inside Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the madness infusing the place.

The corruption observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, or misled by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are casualties; one more dreadful result of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign continues, I hope Mulligan focuses on the idea that, regardless of how “righteous” that war was, the humans who won it may still regret the outcome. Their world has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been cut off, and the beings that were once their guardians, guiding their spirits to security following death, are currently frightening disasters.

Certainly, this might simply be a practical method to solve Gygax’s original dilemma. It is simple to justify killing an divine being when it’s a screaming, mad creature with multiple fangs, but I also feel very intrigued by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s loathing for gods in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {